AUSTRALIA
Eureka Street
John Warhurst | 29 June 2014
Rotten apples with the caption ‘Australian owned and grown’We should open our eyes and take in what multiple government inquiries are telling us about Australian society at the moment. It is not enough to focus on just one; we should consider the revelations cumulatively. It is little exaggeration to say that almost no major institution in our society, public or private, has been left untouched. We should join the dots and cry.
There are many inquiries underway. The four most significant are being conducted by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, the New South Wales Independent Commission against Corruption, and the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce. Each of them is broad and the preliminary findings and the content of public hearings, on top of what we already know from previous investigations and trials, point towards damning conclusions.
A significant focus of the Child Sexual Abuse commission has been dioceses and orders of the Catholic Church. But hearings have also focused on the terrible shortcomings of government-run institutions, other churches and secular non-government organisations, including the Salvation Army, the Scouts and the YMCA. The police and the legal profession have also been implicated.
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